“Mr. Morris?” Rebecca asked, “are you all right? Do you want to sit down?”
“No, I’m fine.” He paused for a second to catch his breath. “Is it true?”
“Is what true, Mr. Morris?”
He was mildly amused to notice that she was lying to him…well, to be generous, not precisely lying, since she hadn’t exactly answered him, but she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about something.
Toying with him was perhaps closer. As if he wouldn’t notice when she turned the snow-job machine on full tilt.
“What that old woman was talking about,” he said patiently. Old indeed. Who knew, he might even have a decade or two on her. He couldn’t really tell, not with her hidden in the shadows like that.
“About this being a ‘death-house.’”
There was a long silence as Rebecca Cantwell rummaged through her purse for her car keys. Abe thought the movement curiously stereotyped, verging on deliberate. She’s stalling, he thought. Why?
The young realtor glanced up and saw him staring at her. She flushed embarrassedly and jerked the key ring out of the depths of her large bag.
“Uh…well,” she said, slipping the key into the door lock, “Uh, to be frank, Mr. Morris…”
Uh-oh, Abe thought. Here it comes. Beware realtors when they decide to “be frank.” He waited, not giving the woman any clues as to how she should proceed to save a once-sure sale that might suddenly be in jeopardy.
“There was…uh…some…unpleasantness here a couple of months ago.”
He opened his car door and slid in. He waited patiently while Rebecca fumbled with ignition and finally started the car. His glance was firm and his face unexpressive.
“The previous owner…a businessman here in the valley, respected, really an exceptional man. Uh, his stepson went…well, Mr. Morris, to be blunt, the kid flipped out completely.”
Behind the unmoving muscles of his face, Abe grinned at Cantwell’s lapse into slang.
Lost his marbles, his generation might have said, or wigged out, blew his gaskets. But the result would be the same, whatever you called it.
“The boy killed his stepfather?” he asked gently. “In the house?”
Cantwell looked momentarily surprised. “Yes, in the master bedroom. And his mother afterward. With a knife.”
Abe winced. That was a bit more than he had anticipated. “How old was he?”
“Fourteen or fifteen, I don’t remember exactly.” Her face was now pale, as if she were the senior citizen who needed to sit down and catch her breath before she fainted.
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead, too.”
Abraham raised one eye brow quizzically.
“Not here,” the woman rushed to add. “Not in the house. He tried to get away in his stepfather’s car. It went off the road a couple of miles from here. There was…an explosion.”
Abe nodded. Then he turned slightly away from where the woman leaned against the door of her powder-blue Cadillac Eldorado, and he studied the house again. Not that the deaths made any difference, of course, not to him at least. It was a shame that things like that happened. The boy was probably on drugs or drunk and just couldn’t handle life. He had heard of such things before, although never quite this tragically. Three people dead. He shifted his position.
The house.
In spite of what might have happened inside a couple of months ago, the house was still a good buy. The inside had been completely renovated: new carpeting in every room; new hardwood doors hung in each room; new paint throughout.
He squinted against the bright sunlight. The mildly angled roof sloped down from each side of a central gable, giving the house a deceptive profile. It looked smaller, closer to the ground than it really was; the fourteen-foot, open-beam cathedral ceiling in the living room had surprised him, as had the fact there were five bedrooms. The place just didn’t look that large. From where he sat, he could see the crisp lines of white-rocked shingles. The roof was in good shape, he decided, and the exterior had recently been repainted as well.
The plants close to the house itself were all young-obviously newly planted. They weren’t doing all that well, but a spot of good fertilizer would fix that. Most of them would probably come out, anyway, since Abraham Morris had very definite ideas as to what was appropriate and not appropriate for front yards and flower beds. Roses, irises, gladiolus, geraniums-that sort of thing. Old fashioned cut flowers like Mattie so much enjoyed. He glanced disapprovingly at the straggling junipers and juvenile jade plants that promised nothing but unending, unchanging, year-round green.
Boring.
He noted with somewhat greater pleasure that the lawn had been re-sodded as well. Vaguely, Abraham wondered what the house must have looked like at the time of the…incident. From all he could see, everything replaceable had been replaced.
But, taken all in all, the place was obviously a good buy. It was perhaps a bit larger than he had originally intended, but that would mean all the more room for the two most important things in his life now that Mattie was gone: his grandchildren, and his collections-definitely in that order. And there was a lot of room for gardening, both in the front and in the deep back yard.
All in all, he repeated, a good buy.
Sold, he said to himself.
He turned to face the realtor, catching the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes-uncertainty coupled with a hungry eagerness to make a sale that he couldn’t miss.
“Well let’s get going,” he said brusquely. “Don’t you have anything else,” he added, knowing full well that any further showings would serve primarily to give him leverage when it came time to bargain for the house on Oleander.
The engine roared as the car backed out of the driveway and negotiated the turn. As they pulled away Abe glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a final glimpse of the house, his house, as he had already started to think of it.
Now for the fun part, he mused silently. Just how hard will this realtor lady bargain to get rid of a death house?
It was going to be entertaining finding out. And then his new life would begin. A new life in a new place, with a new house. He figured he had ten or fifteen good years in front of him.
Even though escrow on the house closed a little over a month and a half later and he moved in two weeks after that, he never saw the woman in yellow again.
2
Abraham Morris had developed diabetes just after his forty-ninth birthday.
“A mild case,” Dr. Sideko said as unconcernedly as if he had been diagnosing a hangnail or an ingrown body hair. “Should be no trouble at all controlling it.”
For the next eighteen years, Abe Morris religiously followed the prescription for Diabinese. And for eighteen years, the medication did in fact control the disease.
When Abe turned sixty-seven, however, the new doctor in California recommended that he change medication.
“The diabetes has worsened slightly,” he said, his youthful face twisted into what he no doubt considered an appropriate expression of concern for the health of his old-timer patient. Abe snorted to himself and caught himself thinking whippersnapper, a word his grandfather had always applied to wet-behind-the-ears doctors that thought they knew everything. “We could go to insulin,” the kid continued.
We, Abraham thought contemptuously. Yeah, right. You and me shooting up together, sliding needles into our thighs on cue. Junkies in tandem. Junkies on parade. We. Right.
“But I think this will work just as well.” The kid-disguised-as-a-doctor handed Abe a prescription for a different drug, Glucotrol, that would take care of everything. He promised.
3
Abe knew that blood disease ran in his family. His father and grandfather had died in their early sixties from heart attacks. He hadn’t really figured on being immune to it, but when his first attack came in the spring of 2003, it was more of a shock than he cared to admit.